Walgreens Cuts Ties With Blood-Test Startup Theranos (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader writes: Walgreens has announced that it's terminating its partnership with blood-testing startup Theranos. All 40 of the "Theranos Wellness Centers" in Walgreen's Arizona drugstores will be shut down immediately, closing what has been a primary link between Theranos and would-be consumers, and further wounding the troubled startup's revenue. "In light of the voiding of a number of test results, and as the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has rejected Theranos' plan of correction and considers sanctions, we have carefully considered our relationship with Theranos and believe it is in our customers' best interests to terminate our partnership," said Walgreens senior vice president Brad Fluegel in a press statement.

Comments

Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

What about all of the homeopathic products still sold at Walgreens stores?

Re:Homeopathic

[tripleevenfall]

I buy all mine from the banner ads I see on Slashdot.

By the way, do you know how acidic your body is?

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

And what about all the tobacco and liquor the sell?

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

Dropping them was purely a business decision. It has nothing to do with actually caring about their customers.

Re:Homeopathic

[HornWumpus]

WTF is wrong with Walgreens? They should sell guns and ammo too.

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

People want to buy that shit, why shouldn't they sell it? Doesn't matter how dumb people are, their money is still good.

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you checked the magazine rack? They might have Guns & Ammo somewhere around the other sports mags.

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, that's how good, predictable companies are supposed to operate: they respond to supply, demand, risk, and reward, without regard to political or cultural pressures.

When a company actually "cares", what that means is that a bunch of rich people try to make a name for themselves by looking good in press releases and lobbying Washington for their pet peeves and ideas about society.

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

Homeopathic products -> "These statements have not been evaluated by the FDA. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. " (But you can totally trust us!)

Vs.

Theranos -> "Our technology works with just a single pinprick!" (because technical magic!) "We're FDA approved" (For preliminary results, but we'll do everything we can to conflate it with blanket approval. ... I don't trust either one.

Re:Homeopathic

[The-Ixian]

A company "cares" exactly as long as it is run by 1 person.

After that, the company may be able to hold on to that image until that image comes into direct conflict with the needs of scale.

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

My blood dissolves plastic and metal. And I can extend my jaw two feet from my head. Why do you ask?

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

Always thought it was funny they'd tell me to "be well!" after ringing me up for two packs of smokes and a case of beer.

Re:Homeopathic

[XxtraLarGe]

WTF is wrong with Walgreens? They should sell guns and ammo too.

A friend of mine said "Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms should be a party store, not a government bureau!" :-D

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention Wal-Mart.

I needed eyedrops one day. I nearly ended up with homeopathic crap (i.e. overpriced water) because as one might imagine, it's pretty hard to read a tiny label saying only "homeopathic" when you're in terrible need of eyedrops. Is it too much to expect the pharmacy to contain actual medicine?

As far as I'm concerned, that's intentionally deceptive and it was only made worse by the fact that this particular product contained "apis" some ill-defined bee extract. Given how severe bee allergies can be, I'd rather NOT put that in my eyes and hope that they really have diluted the dead bees (or whatever "apis" is) into oblivion correctly.

Re:Homeopathic

[Hussman32]

Blood pH varies between 7.25 and 7.45 or so, therefore your body is slightly alkaline.

Re:Homeopathic

[tnk1]

In their defense, if you have "homeopathic" on the label, then Walgreen's is selling a correctly labelled product.

Which is to say "homeopathic" == "placebo".

The problem with Theranos is that their product was labelled "accurate medical testing" explicitly. And it's not. At least people who see "homeopathic" on a box have not been deceived as to their purchase. They're just generally deluded, it's not Walgreen's that is lying to them.

Re:Homeopathic

[magarity]

My blood dissolves plastic and metal

Time to cut back on the Coca-Cola.

Re: Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

Shipwrecked would be a perfect game. Like Battleships but with whisky shots.

Re:Homeopathic

[XxtraLarGe]

At least people who see "homeopathic" on a box have not been deceived as to their purchase. They're just generally deluded, it's not Walgreen's that is lying to them.

Are they deluded, or diluted? Thanks, I'll be here all week!

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought CVS was the big offender there.

Re:Homeopathic

[DivineKnight]

If you're a member, it kind of is...(little by little that cocaine seems to disappear from the evidence locker).

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

If they stocked 5.7x28mm ammo at a decent price, I'd definitely buy it from Walgreens.

Re:Homeopathic

[Anonymous Coward]

were the apis patentable?

Re:Homeopathic

[david_thornley]

You can get homeopathic medicine a lot cheaper without losing any effectiveness in the bottled water section.

Re:Homeopathic

[david_thornley]

Particularly since they added "Explosives". Sounds like a great party to me.

Re:Homeopathic

[cwsumner]

WTF is wrong with Walgreens? They should sell guns and ammo too.

They used to. But the id10T city people screamed at them and they finally quit. 8-(

All the drugstore and hardware stores used to, and many still do. Just not in the cities.

And the bleeding starts

[ColdWetDog]

Maybe they need a transfusion.

Teranov

[tripleevenfall]

In Soviet Russia, Ties Cut You!

The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[smooth wombat]

Heard this wonderful news on NPR this morning. The company has been a sham since the beginning. You name it, they lied about it.

To date Theranos has never let the government or anyone from the outside reproduce the results they claim they get with their system. They have delayed, delayed and delayed.

Now, finally, the fraud of Elizabeth Holmes will be revealed. She can deny all she likes but she has known about this from the beginning.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[HornWumpus]

Somebody needs to examine how their devices got FDA certs.

There was certainly some corruption involved.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Its much more likely that the FDA is like the patent office. A shit load of regulations but actually very little in-depth check. With how many medical devices out there, i have no doubt that products can get pass them by fudging lots of things.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[Gilgaron]

You don't get audited immediately... if the submission looked good then it'd probably go through and most medical products take long enough to ramp up that the audit will still take place before a large rollout.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone actually defined how/to what extent this is a sham though? It would seem to be a pretty easy supposition to test, get a selection of a few dozen people (preferably with some with and some without the tested conditions), send several sets of blood samples out, one to Theranos and couple to a few standard testing firms. After you get the results back chart the differences. The only thing I've heard is they're "not approved", "inaccurate", but no hard numbers. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure they aren't as accurate as standard lab testing, but a Ford Focus isn't as safe as a Mercedes Benz and we aren't banning them. There is a place for somewhat less accurate/much cheaper medical testing, as long as it is used as an indicator and not a definitive result for major medical decisions. I don't know if that is Theranos, or if they are and outright scam. What I do know is that most of the "cut and dry" controversy these get a lot more grey when you dig beyond the headline.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[HornWumpus]

Not testing controlled samples even once?

Somebody was buying drinks at the FDA.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[TroII]

It's mostly because of SJWs that the fraud was allowed to continue as long as it did. They wanted so badly for a woman to take the industry by storm that they threw due diligence to the wind. Questioning a woman is misogyny now, and no one dared look behind the curtain lest the poster child for female CEOs be found not wearing any clothes. In the end they lost their own shirts, bit of poetry if you ask me.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Theranos' results are wildly inaccurate. They also refused to let the FDA or anyone else see the results of their own tests.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[tnk1]

It just seems so odd that she'd think she could get away with such a huge scam from the very beginning. Medical testing is serious business.

My guess is that she was/is delusional about her product and it just snowballed from there. As much as this is going to be a fiasco, I don't think it started as a scam originally.

Of course, no matter how it started, it's a huge scam now, and I think their purchase of normal lab equipment for their labs was after their "oh shit" moment when they realized that their stuff was actually a crock of shit and they were hoping to brazen through it.

I just have to wonder how I would have reacted when I found out that the thing I thought was going to change the world was not real, and how I'd deal with all the investors and attention and possible court cases. As horrible as it seems to fake your way through that, caught up in her own little world, she probably has a distorted view of things that makes her believe that a cover up is the only move that made sense, even though it is only going to make things worse.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[NotAPK]

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that the device fails to work on two levels.

1) The device samples a tiny drop of blood from the periphery of the body. Regardless of the sensitivity of the analyzing device, any blood sample taken in this way (big or small) will not represent the composition of the blood in the body. It may work for some factors (everyone has seen a diabetic test their finger, but even that test is only "close enough" for them to self medicate with it) but not for all, including some significant ones. Theranos claimed they could "correct" for this. It was an extraordinary claim that required extraordinary evidence that it would work. No such evidence has been presented.

2) The device works with a tiny drop of blood. Performing the analysis with such a small sample is problematic. Sure, it will work for some factors, since we have extremely sensitive tests for them, or they are abundant in the sample and easily detected. However, there are other factors that are difficult to detect, even with the largest and most sophisticated machines on the planet sampling an entire vial of blood. It was an extraordinary claim that their testing machine could sample a tiny drop of blood and perform reliable tests. No extraordinary evidence for this claim has ever been presented.

So that's my summary, feel free to read online for a while if you want to find some citations, but it's all been reported pretty well here on Slashdot and in the online media.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you've got a WSJ subscription and can quote something of relevance in that article, the only thing I see is that they withdrew two years of testing results. That could be because they were "wildly inaccurate", or it could be because they "forgot to cross their t's and dot their i's". As noted It would be nice to have some hard numbers, like "25% of Theranos customers were falsely diagnosed with high Cholesterol" or "one in ten thousand cases of HIV positive results were incorrect". Errors/inaccuracies DO exist, even in standard lab testing, the question should be at what rate those errors occur and whether that accuracy is acceptable/unacceptable given the price.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[JoeyRox]

I'm guessing the company started with good intentions. However no amount of ambition and optimism can replace actual technological progress. Their continued secrecy and refusal to submit to independent scientific scrutiny was probably a gambit to buy themselves more time to find a way to get the technology to work. I think as pressure grew to deliver a working product is probably when the line between optimism and misrepresentation (and potential fraud) started to blur. It will be interesting to see how this ends.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is your friend. Try searching for "theranos accuracy"

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the suggestion, I had done several searches but hadn't found anything, but on my last search I found a study from Icahn Institute at Mount Sinai. They did tests comparing Theranos, Labcorp and Quest (the latter two being large testing firms) While overall Theranos appeared to be less accurate than the larger testing firms in most cases it wasn't by much (see the chart in the linked article). And in some cases Theranos appeared to be more accurate than the compared large testing firms. I think the article sums it up pretty well

"But he says that for many of the things they tested, Theranos results were "much more in line with the others than they are out of line." Even more interestingly, he says that "there was as much variability between LabCorp and Quest as there was between Theranos and LabCorp or Theranos and Quest."

It should be noted that the study is limited, it only compared results between the three. It didn't have a "perfect" blood tests from which to tell who was right and who was wrong. And they seemed to do studies which are less definitive, IE blood cell counts, cholesterol, etc not "do you have X disease, etc". But beyond a few tests (MCHC, HDL, Lymph) their results didn't appear to be all that different from the larger labs results.

http://www.businessinsider.com/theranos-study-compares-blood-tests-to-quest-and-labcorp?pundits_only=0&get_all_comments=1&no_reply_filter=1#comment-56f9f63b9037f7482c9c7e20

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the running jokes was, 'Hey Elizabeth, are you getting hot under the collar? Maybe it's time to take off that turtleneck."

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[jdunn14]

I've written code for an FDA approved class 2 device. In this case class 2 means roughly that the device is used for making medical decisions but not in direct contact w the patient. A failure could mislead a physician causing serious harm, but the device can't harm the patient directly. The code actually was the product since the approved "device" was a software program. We had to submit documentation that showed the device was safe when used by the targeted user, in our case a trained physician. We also submitted a lot of paperwork showing how the product was developed w solid tracability to all design decisions for everything from the software to the packaging to the marketing materials. Probably the most important part of those docs was a large table that had to be reviewed at every meeting showing that if the risk of a certain failure was X and the event caused by that failure had severity Y and their combination was above a threshold that we did something to mitigate the risk.

All that documentation ran for hundreds of pages and thankfully my tracability was mostly pointing at source control and saying, "you can see when i did what and why based on the timestamps and what ticket or design requirement it was connected to". Beyond that we had very large data studies showing that the product worked as we claimed. Those consisted of running previously recorded clinical data through our system and showing that with all these real-world recordings we did what we claimed. This counted as real-world since the software was designed to be run against recorded patient data.

At no point along the way did the FDA actually RUN our software or test it independently. The onus of that was on us and we had to submit extensive documentation about that testing. Audits consisted of the FDA representative coming to the company, reading reams of documentation, randomly pulling records that we claimed we had to prove we REALLY did what we said, and speaking with employees to confirm that they had some idea of what they were doing and what documentation they had to produce.

Honestly I'm not sure how else the system could run given that it takes so many incredibly specialized people to reasonably test a device. I don't really see any way the FDA could have a staff capable of doing that without becoming an absolute behemoth and slowing the approval process even more (it took years when you include the testing, verification, and documentation). There's room for improvement, but it's already no walk in the park. The FDA is pretty much making sure that if you claim a product does X that you have data to back that up and then if something goes wrong that you can trace the fault back to the source and know what happened.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[jdunn14]

Check out my description of the FDA software approval process a couple comments up in this thread, but in our case, no the FDA does not run the software directly. You provide reams of documentation regarding tests you've run or had third parties run, documentation showing that you can trace failures back to faults, and documentation demonstrating that you've thought of the various ways the device can fail. I don't know how the regulation of a blood testing device would differ, but I bet it would be similar.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[david_thornley]

No, what it means is that a female scam artist can found a multibillion-dollar company, just like a male scam artist can. It isn't true equality when it takes a competent hard-working woman to do as well as a male scam artist. It's a step towards equality.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm no expert, but my understanding is that the device fails to work on two levels.

1) The device samples a tiny drop of blood from the periphery of the body. Regardless of the sensitivity of the analyzing device, any blood sample taken in this way (big or small) will not represent the composition of the blood in the body. It may work for some factors (everyone has seen a diabetic test their finger, but even that test is only "close enough" for them to self medicate with it) but not for all, including some significant ones. Theranos claimed they could "correct" for this. It was an extraordinary claim that required extraordinary evidence that it would work. No such evidence has been presented.

2) The device works with a tiny drop of blood. Performing the analysis with such a small sample is problematic. Sure, it will work for some factors, since we have extremely sensitive tests for them, or they are abundant in the sample and easily detected. However, there are other factors that are difficult to detect, even with the largest and most sophisticated machines on the planet sampling an entire vial of blood. It was an extraordinary claim that their testing machine could sample a tiny drop of blood and perform reliable tests. No extraordinary evidence for this claim has ever been presented.

So that's my summary, feel free to read online for a while if you want to find some citations, but it's all been reported pretty well here on Slashdot and in the online media.

It's possible Theranos is sitting on some terrific microfluidics separations platform that allows them to do near-lossless sample preparations. It would be a game changing technology in academia and industry. Of course, if this were true, it would mean their decision to build it into a pathology testing process was incredibly short-sighted and foolish.

Re:The fraud called Theranos is almost dead

[HornWumpus]

This was a novel device. Not just another blood sugar meter.

A wildly inaccurate blood test is dangerous. They would have had to assert fictitious error levels and should have had to reference basic research.

How can someone assert a test is accurate without controlled testing? Even if the FDA didn't do the tests directly, they should have seen the research.

Politics

[DidgetMaster]

If they wanted to lie and perpetrate a fraud on the American people; instead of business, they should have gone into politics where that kind of behavior is rewarded instead of punished.

Re:Politics

[HornWumpus]

You can bet the politicians the twisted arms at the FDA will never pay a price.

Re:Politics

[HornWumpus]

...that twisted arms...duh

Re:Politics

[Anonymous Coward]

Darn. The image of "the twisted arms at the FDA" was pretty powerful, whatever it could have implied.

Nelson laugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha Ha!

SO enjoyable to see this hipster girl flame out.

Also

[Anonymous Coward]

I heard Walgreens is cutting ties with its customers. "Too much bullshit," said CEO Stefano Pessina.

E-meters

[110010001000]

Will Walgreens at least keep stocking e-Meters? I cannot remain Clear without one.

Re:Yet another sign of sexism in the industry

[Grishnakh]

Exactly.

And any Democrat voter who didn't register as a Republican (if they could in their state) and vote for Carly Fiorina in the primaries is obviously a sexist and misogynist.

Not to Bel-Air

[Anonymous Coward]

finally, the fraud of Elizabeth Holmes will be revealed

Yo, Holmes, NOT to Bel-Air!

Re: Not to Bel-Air

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just... no.

Re: Not to Bel-Air

[Anonymous Coward]

Come on, man! I know you laughed! Admit it!

P.T. Barnum in a Steve Jobs Turtleneck

[Jodka]

Now, finally, the fraud of Elizabeth Holmes will be revealed. She can deny all she likes but she has known about this from the beginning.

Someone recently called her "P.T. Barnum in a Steve Jobs Turtleneck," but that comparison is unfair to Barnum. Barnum promoted a product which is legitimately intangible: entertainment. Holmes is also promoting something intangible, but which actually needs to exist and work to have value: blood tests.

This will rename Walgreens

[Anonymous Coward]

Walgreens is now Theranos' Ex